Art: Escaping The Provincial Trap

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But it could be faced and challenged, and that was what the artists did, beginning with Torres-Garcia. Torres-Garcia's education as an artist took place in Barcelona, where he and his family moved in 1891. Then, Barcelona was regarded by most people (other than Catalans, of course) as a province. It was not; it gave him the chance to know certain great early modernist sculptors, such as Julio Gonzalez, and the very young Picasso; he even worked with the architect Antoni Gaudi. Later, in Paris, he would come to know Mondrian. But he never lost his fascination with what was local and what a sense of place could mean.

What the artist of the "school of the South" must do, he insisted, is "remain conscious of the world without forgetting what is close at hand," and work toward making the local universal. Paintings like his Locomotive with Constructive House, 1934, mean, he said, that "the romantic age of the picturesque is over and that we are faced with the Doric age of form"; to accept modernity is "to be more Uruguayan than ever," to decolonize oneself as an artist.

There is nothing picturesque or "tropical" about the work of Torres-Garcia and the artists he stimulated into an enhanced sense of cultural independence. It's just that the work on view here does very little to remind you of North American styles. It is independent, as indeed it yearned and needed to be. It affirms that in the 1960s and after, there was indeed a way out of the provincial trap; that you could indeed be modern without becoming a colonized clone or succumbing to this or that international recipe.

Many of the artists in this show spent time doing their work outside South America. Significantly, though, they were not much drawn to New York. North America was an imperium they felt nothing in common with and whose weight they didn't want to succumb to. In the '60s the American art world might have felt that Paris was in decline, but that didn't worry the South Americans; perhaps, indeed, it attracted them because being in Paris left them feeling freer.

So a lot of the work in this show is almost fiercely sparse without owing anything to U.S. minimalism, like Helio Oiticica's origami-like Spatial Relief, 1959-91. An artist like Lygia Clark could make cool, immaculately crafted sculptures of sheet metal, which, their leaves hinged together, had no final or definitive form and yet conveyed an impression of intense rigor. But there is nothing snobbish or intimidating about Clark's work, none of the huge scale of pretension involved in the end-of-history rhetoric of (North) American minimalism.

Jesus-Rafael Soto is probably the most approachable of these artists. Not because he is any less abstract than the others; in fact, there are no figurative clues in his work, nothing that could even remotely be interpreted as a face, a body or a landscape, although the tangled disorder of some of the earlier pieces can put you in mind of a thicket or a hedgerow. But he's easier to get at partly because his work has such a strong element of play built into it. The intensity of its effects come from pure optical flicker, which in turn depends on the movements of the viewer's eye.